"Where's That Tiger" asks our overall leader, Neale Webb. Usual position, Neale - top of the leaderboard at the end of yet another tournament and top of the Golf Masters' earning list by over £250,000 - with three majors still to go. We read yesterday that Woods had priced himself out of next year's Heineken Classic in Melbourne, with promoter Tony Roosenburg conceding: "We can't afford him, he's out of our league". Well, we felt a bit that way ourselves at Golf Masters' HQ after last year, but, in the end, rather than banning him from the competition (as some managers suggested - yes, those managers who'd hired Colin Montgomerie instead) we decided to make life more difficult for Tiger lovers this time around.
We assumed that the £6.5 million price tag would be prohibitive, would make some of you think twice about hiring him and, thus, would allow one or two non-Tiger devotees a slice of the first-prize chasing action. Huh, so much for that.
A quick browse through the line-ups of this week's overall top 10 left us with an overwhelming sense of deja vu: Woods is the man once again, and if you're the manager of one of the 16,000odd teams that doesn't employ his services we suspect you're beginning to regret not investing half your budget in him at registration time. If he isn't in you can't win, we're beginning to reckon - as do the 75 managers who transferred him in to their teams last week.
Fionnuala McMahon's eighth placed Aladdin Sane team is the only top 10 line-up not to include Woods, but that's only after transferring him out a few weeks back. All the others profited from his fourth win in five events at the Deutsche Bank Open, lifting him to 30th out of 237 on our "best value for money" list, a fairly remarkable position considering his price tag.
Woods contributed over half the week 12 earnings of Neale Webb's leading team, with Henrik Stenson, who's top of our current bargain buy list, and Paul McGinley bringing in another £100,000 combined for their top 10 finishes in Germany, the second of four consecutive bonus tournaments in Europe.
Derek Kerrigan of Corcullen, Co Galway, was one of the few Tiger-less managers to have a week 12 of note, with Kero's C Team bagging their boss a fourball in Powerscourt after holding off the challenge of The Moriarty Tribunal, managed by none other than . . . Neale Webb. (Neale was fifth on the weekly leaderboard last week, second this week . . . maybe next week, Neale).
Star of the show for Derek was Sergio Garcia (who features in 856 teams), winner of the Colonial in Texas, with Peter O'Malley, Michael Lundberg, Nick O'Hern, Paul McGinley and Justin Rose (joint third, fifth, eighth, 12th and 28th at the Deutsche Bank Open) bringing the team total to a whopping £397,000.
There's more bonus money to be won at the Volvo PGA Championship this week while our cross-Atlantic action takes place at the Kemper Open in Maryland.
